Sea, By Mark Laita

(Mark Laita)

Mark Laita's underwater photography – in which vivid colours shine out of inky black backgrounds and abstract patterns dapple across the underside of the water's surface – is an attempt to capture the grace and sheer strangeness of marine life.

The image's production is highly artificial, requiring tanks, studios and strobe lights. "[I treat] these creatures as beautiful still-life objects," he says. But paradoxically, they more accurately represent the animals' true colours than traditional marine photography, in which the red part of the spectrum is filtered out by the seawater. Pictured, an emperor angelfish.